You actually didn’t watch people get blown up live. The crew survived the fire blast—it was the crash into the water ~3 mins later that killed them.

It’s the “not handling” part that gets us as kids. We knew better. Adults didn’t. In my case, I was in high school, but it was on a “Teacher workday, student holiday” we had each semester. I watched it live on NASA TV, which we had on channel UHF 55 in the DC area. Even the voice of mission control delayed about a minute or two. I remember thinking, “THAT didn’t look good…” but then they said nothing but normal speed and temp readings, so I thought it was just the angle of the chase plane. Only when the famous “forked cloud” appeared that the announcer said, “we have an apparent major malfunction,” or something.

Same. I think that episode was shown in-class, too, so I came alarmingly close to the XKCD.

Maybe it’s because it’s because I just finished reading this section in Range, but I think it’s more than the engineers knew.

When sociologist Diane Vaughan interviewed NASA and Thiokol engineers who had worked on the rocket boosters, she found that NASA’s own famous can-do culture manifested as a belief that everything would be fine because “we followed every procedure”; because “the [flight readiness review] process is aggressive and adversarial”; because “we went by the book.” NASA’s tools were its familiar procedures. The rules had always worked before. But with Challenger they were outside their usual bounds, where “can do” should have been swapped for what Weick calls a “make do” culture. They needed to improvise rather than throw out information that did not fit the established rubric.

Roger Boisjoly’s unquantifiable argument that the cold weather was “away from goodness” was considered an emotional argument in NASA culture. It was based on interpretation of a photograph. It did not conform to the usual quantitative standards, so it was deemed inadmissible evidence and disregarded. The can-do attitude among the rocket-booster group, Vaughan observed, “was grounded in conformity.” After the tragedy, it emerged that other engineers on the teleconference agreed with Boisjoly, but knew they could not muster quantitative arguments, so they remained silent. Their silence was taken as consent. As one engineer who was on the Challenger conference call later said, “If I feel like I don’t have data to back me up, the boss’s opinion is better than mine.”

I think most of us believe decisions should be data driven, but in some edge cases gut instinct is valuable.

It is easy to say in retrospect. A group of managers accustomed to dispositive technical information did not have any; engineers felt like they should not speak up without it. Decades later, an astronaut who flew on the space shuttle, both before and after Challenger, and then became NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance, recounted what the “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data” plaque had meant to him: “Between the lines it suggested that, ‘We’re not interested in your opinion on things. If you have data, we’ll listen, but your opinion is not requested here.’”

📺 Richard Feynman explains.

Yep, the soviet space program took fewer lives overall.

The Soviet program is still haunted by the ghost of a frozen Laika in perpetual orbit.

always.

I mean… not really.

🛰️ Space Race Fatalities Comparison: Soviet Union vs United States

Key Takeaways

• 🇺🇸 U.S. suffered more astronaut fatalities, including test pilots and training accidents.
• 🇷🇺 Soviets had higher total human losses, especially among engineers and soldiers during explosive launch and fuel testing incidents.
• 🔥 The Apollo 1 fire led to sweeping design and safety reforms in NASA.
• 🚨 The Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 tragedies were fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 11 remains the only in-space human fatality.
• 🕵️ The Nedelin disaster, one of the worst rocket catastrophes in history, killed over 100 but was kept secret for decades.
• 🧾 Transparency and institutional accountability were key differences: NASA publicly investigated accidents; the USSR often concealed failures.

Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!

When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.

The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.

…no, i think that was a nipplegate thing…

🤣…the teacher chose threatening with hellfire and brimstone. OMG.

Damn that’s cold

“No matter how good your life is, you could be next, children!”

Um, actually!

The crew didn’t blow up instantly at all, at that exact moment! They spent another three minutes falling back to Earth, where they blew up instantly upon hitting the surface!

There’s speculation that Reagan was the impetus behind the “go fever” that caused the Challenger disaster. The idea is that he wanted to have a live uplink to Challenger during his State of the Union, and that his desire to use them as props was why NASA was in such an all-fired hurry to launch no matter the consequences.

No idea how grounded in reality the speculation is, but it tracks for Reagan.

Yeah millenial’s earliest memory of tragedy is said to be 9/11. Can confirm as a baby millenial who was 7 at the time.